>Does your acceptable use policy allow your business clients to send bulk,
>unsolicited commercial e-mail using your facilities?
Yes it does. Provided that it is for a legitimate product and to a targeted
list. The problems most people experience with spam is that the messages
are not targeted, and aren't selling anything other than some scam or vaporware.
>However, look at what happened in the early days of the fax machine.
>Junk faxes. There are now laws against this. Dealing with junk e-mail
>is the number one customer service issue here. Far more than busy
>signals, installation problems, or PM-3 modems going ADMIN.
That statement made my jaw drop. Although we no longer deal with consumer
accounts, I could only pray that 'junk mail' could have been our number one
customer service issue. My recollection is that in our case, the strange
Win 95 dial-up networking bugs probably caused us the most headaches. It's
amazing that your customers call you more about junk mail than anything else.
>> While I agree that none of us want Livingston to become a spam factory,
>> e-mail has become a legitimate business tool. Receiving an unsolicited
>> message from Livingston via e-mail isn't any different that receiving the
>> unsolicited snail mail brochures that come from them on a periodic basis.
>
>Yes it is. You don't get their snail-mail postage due. Their
>telemarketers don't call you collect. E-mail is indeed a legitimate
>business tool. Unsolicited, bulk, commercial e-mail is not. It is
>pollution.
I don't get commercial e-mail postage due, either. Neither do our
customers. All billing to customers and our circuit costs are at a fixed
monthly rate, and smtp traffic is such a tiny fraction of what flows through
the network as to be negligible.
>You consider the sending of bulk, unsolicited, commercial e-mail to be
>one of the very benefits of the Internet and you're working hard to
>convey this to your business customers? Really?
I consider the Internet to be a communications network. It's not much
different than the telephone network in terms of our acceptable use policy,
and since telephone networks are slowing moving away from being circuit
switched platforms to packet switched like the Internet itself, I'm not sure
there is going to be any huge difference in a few years.
If one of our customers can lawfully pick up the phone and call 400 people
(using the Livingston issue as an example) and ask them if they'd like to
get a newsletter subscription or more info on a product that they are
selling, then they are welcome to purchase bandwidth from us and send that
same message to those same customers instead.
We're not talking Cyberpromo or Savetrees here. A message to 400 ISPs about
networking equipment is not inappropriate in my view. Sending that same
message to 6 million AOL users is another story.
>Certainly, translating the investment to sales dollars is one of the
>primary reasons why businesses connect to the net. Prospecting online,
>if it involves spam, is going over the edge.
Again, I don't think so when it involves a very targeted list. You received
e-mail from someone at Livingston because you are known to buy that type of
hardware. These types of e-mail are not spam when compared to e-mail about
some "home based business opportunity" or MLM scam.
>The issue is that of the "camel's nose under the tent" where once you
>open the door to a little bit of spam, you're buried in it.
Well, how do you control what communications you receive? How do you
balance someone's right to send a message vs your right not to receive a
message...assuming such 'rights' even exist? The sender paid the way for
that message to arrive at a NAP somewhere, and you paid for it to be
delivered from that NAP to whatever box on which you receive your mail.
If it was a phone call rather than an e-mail message, what do you do? Turn
off the ringer on your phone? There are some tradeoffs involved in
connecting a computer to a global communications network, and I started this
thread because I expected you to understand that more so than most people
and was surprised that you went ballistic over the mail from Livingston.
To me, it was a reaction totally out of proportion to the stimuli.
But what do I know. I can't argue with your option to feel any way you like
about that.
Damien
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